Abstract Summary
Most coral nurseries focus on in-water growing of fast-growing branching species to relatively small sizes for outplanting; the State of Hawaii has recently implemented an innovative program which combines collection of small (10 cm) live massive forms of coral colonies (mostly from within public harbors); placing them into the State’s land-based Coral Restoration Nursery where they are micro-fragged and then fast-grown using advanced aquarium husbandry techniques into large-sized (42 cm and 84+ cm) massive colonies in a fraction of the time it would take to occur naturally (in Hawaii, these corals grow 1 -2 cm/year; to grow to 42 cm would take 20+ years in the wild). The resulting large colony modules are then placed onto degraded natural Hawaiian coral reefs in an effort to restore these reefs back towards their earlier ecologically-complex state. The outplanted colonies are evaluated using the State’s Coral Ecological Services and Functions Tool and the resulting offset can be used by developers and Responsible Parties to pay for coral and habitat loss incurred elsewhere in Hawaii. The result is a dynamic program to put out large, live coral colonies, paid for without large expenditures of public monies, and without the extremely long natural recovery rates (one year instead of decades) for large corals normally seen in Hawaii. The program is now expanding to focus on extremely rare coral species to re-introduce them back into the wild using similar mechanisms.
